REVIEW:

In the first place, the choral works featured on this disc put paid to the often-voiced contention that Gordon Getty is no more than simply a millionaire indulging himself as a dilettante composer. His insistence on producing music that is approachable on first hearing, which thirty years ago when he began his career might have appeared quixotic, is now thankfully restored to the musical mainstream; and the seriousness with which he approaches the setting of the words he chooses (or writes himself) makes a refreshing change from the purely decorative style of some modern composers who similarly seek to appeal to the general listener.

In the second place, the performances themselves – two distinct sessions with different sets of artists (the Moscow patch to one of the Victorian Scenes notwithstanding) – are generally of superior quality to those found on the later discs of Getty’s music. It makes a distinct difference having choral singers of the calibre of the American and Swedish bodies here, with their natural employment of the English language enabling them to engage more closely with the text, as well as established international symphony orchestras to accompany them – although that is not to gainsay the sterling efforts of the German broadcasting bodies responsible for the later issues.

In the third place, the reissue of the original material still brings with it the full texts and introductory notes both by the composer and by James Keller, the latter furnishing us with more information regarding the origins of the music than we find in more recent Getty issues from Pentatone. These notes also come with translations into both German and French, although the lyrics are provided in English only (the three Welsh songs are furnished with English translations by the composer).

The disc begins with the cycle Young America, which is altogether the most impressive of Getty’s choral works I have heard – all the more so since the poems, mostly by the composer himself, seem to strike just the right note with their subtly shifting but striking modulations and occasional outbursts of emotion. The opening Hark the Homeland is a Whitmanesque sort of apotheosis to America, and forms a marvellous contrast to the imitation folk ballad Heather Mary with its haunting cor anglais solo warmly played by Julie Anne Giacobassi. My uncle’s house has a mood reminiscent of Barber’s Knoxville, at once boisterous and dream-like, and after an ominous orchestral War Interlude the dance-like Daughter of Asheville has a haunted quality which continues into the final setting of Stephen Vincent Benét’s positively spooky When Daniel Boone goes by night. The settings of the poems are continuous, and despite their contrasts they cohere into a most convincing unity. The excellent San Francisco chorus also distinguish themselves in the sympathetic setting of Poe’s Annabel Lee, scored for male voices only.

The Victorian Scenes, originally composed as independent a cappella pieces and only subsequently provided with accompaniments, are less satisfactory as a whole. The three settings of Housman (rather oddly described as a Victorian poet, when his first verse was not published until 1896, and his sensibility is so quintessentially Edwardian) tend to lack the sense of desolation that underpins the words. The Tennyson treatments work better, and Getty does make a real attempt in The splendour falls to convey the mysticism of the “horns of Elfland faintly blowing”. Mind you, in that poem he is up against formidable treatments of the same text from Delius and Britten; but his distinct and different approach is equally convincing. On the other hand in the added orchestral accompaniments, the over-closely observed church bells in Tennyson’s The time draws near sound positively alarming.

The settings of the Three Welsh folksongs are effective, if not conspicuously Celtic in tone. His rich treatment of Ar hyd y nos (rendered into English as All through the night) is probably the best of the three, with the approach of night casting a long heavily romantic shadow across the music. The Swedish choir, both here and in the Victorian Scenes, give not the slightest hint of a non-English accent.

The final item on the disc gives us a complete performance of the ‘Jerusalem’ scene of the death of Henry IV from Getty’s opera Plump Jack. This is particularly interesting, as the later recording of the ‘concert version’ of the opera on Pentatone omitted the first four minutes or so from the score, with the extensive narration of the defeat of the rebellion which precipitates the king’s collapse removed. Unfortunately hearing the relevant passage in this older recording does not leave any sense of regret at its later loss; the delivery of the text is very trenchant and recitative-like in tone, with some of Shakespeare’s text at its baldest and most bombastic. The latter part of the scene, on the other hand, is here given with considerably more dramatic involvement; and Vladimir Chernov as the King makes his death into a positive parallel of a Russian czar – “How I came by the crown, O God forgive” has all the overtones of a Boris Godunov as delivered here. Indeed the singing, despite some variable English accents, is generally more effective than on the later recording of the abridged version.

This is probably the most enjoyable of all the recordings I have encountered of Getty’s music and its reissue is therefore conspicuously welcome. The sound of the various forces and venues involved is well matched, and the presentation is excellent. Those who are tempted to belittle the composer’s abilities are recommended to hear Young America.

-- MusicWeb International

This album includes the legendary recording of Michael Tilson Thomas conducting live musicians in the original jazz orchestra version of Rhapsody in Blue, with the solo part performed by a player piano operated by George Gershwin's own piano rolls.

Adam: Giselle

Brahms: Serenade No. 1, Op. 11, Tragic Overture, Op. 81 & Ac

Also available on Blu-ray

The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood spotlights Bernstein's wide-ranging talents as a composer, his many gifts as a great interpreter and champion of other composers, and his role as an inspirer of a new generation of musicians and music lovers across the country and around the globe. The gala concert features a kaleidoscopic array of artists and ensembles from the worlds of classical music, film, and Broadway. The entire first half of the program is dedicated to selections from such brilliant Bernstein works as Candide, West Side Story, Mass, and Serenade. Music from the classical canon very dear to Bernstein's heart-selections includes from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the finale of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony and music by Aaron Copland, plus a new work by John Williams.

TILSON THOMAS CONDUCTS IVES, SIBELIUS AND WAGNER

Charles Ives: Orchestral Set No. 1, “3 Places in New England”

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 63

Richard Wagner: Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor

Recorded live at the Symphony Hall, Boston, 1970

Bonus:
- Interview with Michael Tilson Thomas, 1970 & 2013

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Enhanced Mono
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Booklet notes: English, French, German
Running time: 104 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

R E V I E W:
IVES Three Places in New England1. SIBELIUS Symphony No. 42. WAGNER Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey2 & • Michael Tilson Thomas, cond; Boston SO • ICA 5111 (DVD: 104:08+31:00) Live: Boston 11/13/1970, 23/10/1970

& Tilson Thomas interviews (1970 and 2013)

It’s a shock to see what might pass for a teenaged Michael Tilson Thomas bounding to the podium in Boston’s Symphony Hall. Actually, he was an old man of 25 at the time of these broadcasts, and already an experienced conductor. He obviously had definite ideas about what he wanted to do with these works, and the skills to go ahead and do it.

Tilson Thomas made a terrific recording of the Ives in Boston, also in 1970, and this live performance is very similar. What strikes me about Tilson Thomas’s approach to this score is how sharp he keeps its rhythmic and harmonic outlines. He conducts it like chamber music, and no detail is allowed to vanish into an Impressionist haze. The whiffs of African-American spirituals in the first movement are more noticeable than in any other recording I know, and the second movement, if it lacks something of the boyish joy that Ormandy (for example) brought to it, never sounds congested. Tilson Thomas also makes much of the eerie, flickering colors with which Ives painted “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” Overall, this performance has a strong impact, both musically and emotionally.

A few months later Tilson Thomas conducted Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, which the BSO had not played in 30 years. Because Tilson Thomas never recorded this Symphony—has he recorded any Sibelius at all, other than the Violin Concerto?—I was very curious to hear it. My curiosity was rewarded with one of the strangest yet, in its way, most compelling performances of this work that I have heard so far. Especially in the second and fourth movements, the music zips along with incredible impetuousness. The second movement really does sound like a Scherzo, and the fourth movement moves forward with inexorable kinetic energy. Even the forbidding first movement is made to seem less stark than usual. A Symphony commonly regarded as dark and brooding seems much less so in Tilson Thomas’s reading. This won’t be a reading for everyone, but the only detail I really questioned was the use of both tubular bells and glockenspiel in the last movement. The former are so loud than I kept running to my front door and asking, “Who is it?” It’s wonderful, though, to hear the characteristic Boston sound being applied to this work.

Similarly, Wagner is not a composer generally associated with Tilson Thomas, but in fact he spent the summer of 1966 as an assistant conductor at the Bayreuth Festival at the invitation of Wagner’s granddaughter. (As he relates in his interview from 2013, it was this “gig” that resulted, by a series of fortunate circumstances, in his eventually becoming the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s assistant director.) Wagner is even less a prominent in the conductor’s discography than Sibelius. Even so, this “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” is completely convincing, even if it doesn’t follow the status quo. (The opening pages are almost static, but as Siegfried journeys further and further down the Rhine, it blossoms into an exciting, joyous ride, and one in which bombast has no place.) Here and in the Sibelius, there are some moments of imperfect ensemble and intonation, but otherwise, the standard of playing is very high.

I believe that Boston’s WGBH originally broadcast these programs. The colors look a little washed out, but apart from that, it is surprising how well everything has held up, including the sound. Even though it is monaural (“enhanced,” according to ICA Classics), it still has plenty of juice and depth.

The earlier interview, with Andrew Raeburn, is short, lasting just over four minutes, and is devoted almost entirely to the Sibelius. In the later interview (27:00), recorded last June, Tilson Thomas talks about his early career, and recalls the many fine conductors and orchestral musicians he worked with in Boston. Both are fun to watch, but it’s the music-making that counts, of course, and there’s much here to attract admirers of the conductor and the repertoire.

FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle

Music by Stanley Silverman, libretto by Richard Foreman.

Tracks:
1 Elephant Drone; Elephants 3:01
2 Elephant Heartbeats 2:03
3 Don’t You Believe; My Ears 2:21
4 All Shook Up 1:33
5 Read My Palms; My Hands Are Inside the Wall; Gavotte 3:52
6 Read My Palm; Watch Me Move; I’m No Closer; Look at My Hands 6:33
7 Stop Seeing Reinhardt 5:23
8 Entr’acte; Watch Me Put My Right Foot 5:27
9 I Am No Longer Beautiful; Beautiful As Is 4:43
10 We Sit in the Window 4:13
11 Gypsy Tango; Shoot Them 3:31
12 You’re on the Radio; Radio Waves 3:34
13 Dreaming of Reinhardt 1:04
14 Midnight Sun 4:05
15 Photograph Song 1:29
16 Madrigals 2:50
17 Vaudeville Chase; Stirring Soup; A Strange Thing 4:32
18 Finale 4:35

Scrubwoman – Karen Altman
Hannah – Susan Belling
Max – Luther Enstad
Doctor – Roland Gagnon
Otto – Larry Marshall
Rock Singer – Luther Rix
Ragtime Lady – Marilyn Sokol
Hartman – PhilipSteele
Archangel – Michael Tilson Thomas

Chorus: Patti Austin, Jane Gunter, Dianne Higginbotham, June Magruder, Patricia Price, Albertine Robinson, Maeretha Stewart, Rose Taylor

Electronic music realized by Pril Smiley at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Laboratory.

It is a tribute to Janácek's genius that we always think of him as a 20th century composer. In fact he was aged 46 when the new century began, but of course he continued to develop and the majority of his compositions of lasting value were written in the final phase of his life.

The Indian Summer that is Janácek's final decade contains his greatest music, indeed some of the finest operas and instrumental works ever written, This is not to deny, however, that prior to that period a few of his compositions, including the orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba and the opera Jenufa, attain the same high standards.

Composed in 1926, the Sinfonietta uses a large orchestra, the outer movements requiring a complement of extra brass, including fourteen trumpets. Tilson Thomas conducts a performance which enjoys very high standards of playing, as well as a clear and well focused recording. If the results are not quite in the front rank of recorded performances, that is because the rhythmic attack lacks the cutting edge which this music seems to gain in the hands of native Czech performers. (Rafael Kubelik (Deutsche Grammophon) is particularly effective.) But Tilson Thomas does offer compensations, since the more lyrical moments of the work have a poetic beauty which seems hard to match. Any doubts about the more dramatic agenda do not present major problems, though for sheer drama other performances can add an extra dimension.

Performance standards are high also in the Glagolitic Mass, with marvellous playing from the LSO, while the LSO Chorus matches their standard. Make no mistake, this music is fearsome in its technical demands and these things should not be taken for granted, even if the fact of recorded performances can encourage us to expect excellence at the push of a button.

As in the Sinfonietta, the quieter, more reflective aspects of the Mass are beautifully done, and beautifully captured by the recording, too. There is careful attention to dynamic shadings and characterful phrasing.

The soloists make an effective team, and it is interesting to hear Felicity Palmer take the mezzo soprano part, where previously she was the soprano soloist on Sir Simon Rattle's performance on EMI. Gary Lakes, that fine Wagnerian tenor, is caught in good voice, though he does struggle occasionally with his Czech diction.

Tilson Thomas conducts with a sense of real dedication and commitment, and the dramatic aspects of the work come across with biting clarity and directness. For this is a splendid performance of a choral work which gets more powerful and compelling with each performance one hears.

-- Terry Barfoot, MusicWeb International

Ives: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3

Maybe reviewers fuss too much about couplings, but in this case, with the Prelude a l'apresmidi dun faune these days extending the timings of virtually every Debussy issue, and with nearly two decades separating it from the later Jeux and La boite a joujoux, as well as it not being a ballet—oh, all right: it may have been conceived for the stage, and was choreographed (and vulgarized) by Nijinsky in 1912—surely a more enterprising choice in keeping with the theme would have been the contemporary and unjustly neglected ballet Khamma. With the standard of performance on offer here, that would indeed have formed a cherishable disc. As it happens, Tilson Thomas's Prelude is very fine: richly drawn and, compared to the recent versions from Boulez (DG) and Solti (Decca), traditionally drawn out, long-breathed and languorous. Overloud horns in the fourth bar would seem to forecast fog, not heat-haze; in other respects the balance (from EMI's Abbey Road Studio No. 1) is good, with integrated but focused solo strings, harps and antique cymbals.

"Toy-boxes are really towns in which the toys live like people" wrote Andre Helle who, in 1913, devised the scenario for La boite a joujoux (adding "or perhaps towns are just boxes in which people live like toys"). But Debussy made no attempt at meaningful symbolism; "something to amuse the children—nothing more" he said. In giving life to the wooden figures, and with its prominent role for piano, inevitably one's thoughts turn to Petrushka, far more dramatically effective, but hardly a children's story—well, not a child of 1913 anyway. Tilson Thomas is more artful than Torteher on Chandos: in the first tableau his doll dances her waltz with more look-at-me' allure and grace—Tortelier's rubato is comparatively (perhaps aptly) mechanical—and, after Punch has biffed the little soldier on the nose, an angrier captain pops his head out of the box. On the debit side, a wooden doll surely wouldn't pray as quietly as does the LSO clarinet in the following tableau after the battle (track 4, 4'45": the marking is only piano); the distant shepherd's piping in the third tableau is not really distant at all, and the flutes are too loud at the moment of embrace between the soldier and the doll at the end of the scene. Whilst I'm grumbling, Sony's notes don't include a synopsis—as entertainment, this music, unlike Jeux, is dependent on knowledge of the stage action (Chandos supply a detailed scenario). If forced to make a choice between the two, it would be Tilson Thomas; his is the more polished, confident and stylish account.

Perhaps Debussy was attracted to the idea of a children's ballet in 1913 to cleanse himself from the sins of Nijinsky's staging of his Prelude and Jeux (May 1912 and 1913 respectively). While enthusiastically welcoming Simon Rattle's Jeux (EMI), CH noted that the music's free-born invention was "sacrificed a little in favour of a richer romanticism". It could be argued, too, that Haitink (Philips) achieves his unrivalled clarity and delicacy at the expense of a degree of passion. I happen to feel that both, more successfully than Tilson Thomas, and in their quite different ways, achieve a special fantasy, and that contrejour lighting which Debussy was aiming at in his orchestration to oversimplify, it's a question of ensuring equal prominence for the woodwind. The LSO strings are unsteady in their opening four-bar chord (unusually played here as two plus two), but there's a line of accumulating energy from the main theme at fig. 51 (12'29") through to the climax at fig. 71 (16'23") which is less easy to feel in Rattle's and Haitink's accounts. With a slightly faster basic tempo this Jeux bears out Tilson Thomas's judgement, as he himself put it in GRAMOPHONE in February 1991, in knowing "what to hold on to and what to throw away".

-- Gramophone [11/1992]

Alicia de Larrocha's Beethoven is 'central' in the most constructive sense of that term—in other words, moderately paced, warm-hearted, cleanfingered and free of attention-seeking mannerisms. Tilson Thomas reflects her comparatively romantic bias—this isn't quite the superfine Beethoven of his ECO symphony cycle—and has the LSO support her with poise and propriety. The Sonata is equally composed, though here de Larrocha traces some interesting contrapuntal detail (at the beginning of the Andante, for example).

-- Gramophone [12/1993]
reviewing these performances included as part of RCA 61675

Beethoven: Late Choral Music

This selection contains both DDD and ADD recordings.
Net proceeds from the sale of this album will go to the American Red Cross.

This disc includes both ADD and DDD recordings.